


Time & Space

by BelowBedlam



Series: Poetry for Interstellar Blitz [6]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Garrus and Tali are friends still kinda, Gen, The Illusive man is from Connecticut and his favorite movie is Tron, Z and Garrus continue to be weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 10:48:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8246216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BelowBedlam/pseuds/BelowBedlam
Summary: Zisys Shepard wakes up to a burning ship, but not the one she was on last time she checked.(last time she checked was two years ago)An intro piece for ME2 storyline.





	

_Saren is invincible, too fast and too strong, his laughter like background music as he kills them. Tali first; he catches sweet Tali by the throat and squeezes. Suit crushes first, and it_ _’s a stretch of her high-pitch screaming, feet kicking, before her neck is caught and crushed and she’s nothing but a corpse already half-buried, flung away like a dirty rag. She falls right in front of where Zisys is…_

_Wait a minute._ The dream slows, and Zisys feels out of place. She’s too aware, and it makes her skin crawl. Makes her want to wake up because dreaming is scary, unpredictable. _That_ _’s not real. That’s not what happened._

“Shepard.”

Zisys wakes up all at once and feels a little too healthy. All of her senses are lightning-quick, she can smell everything, her vision is sharp.  She’s in a sealed room but she can feel the faint push of air through the vents, high on the ceiling. She hears loud thudding from outside, close. Maybe too close; her heart beats a quick rhythm.

“Commander Shepard, get out of that bed.” A voice with a light accent crackles through a comm. Not the _Normandy_ _’s_ comm; this isn’t the _Normandy_ , sure as hell isn’t Dr. Chakwas’s medical bay.

The room shakes; on the other side of the glass, fire spits out from a door half-jammed, its security light flashing. Something angled and metallic falls off of the ceiling.

_Is this place under attack?_

“Shepard, get up _now_. This facility is under attack.”

 _Of fucking course it is._ Zisys looks around the room, slides off of the medical table with a grunt of pain because she feels healthy, but she’s clearly had a rough time. Like she’s been sliced up, and put back together. Whatever suit they’ve got her in fits, but it isn’t her fucking suit.

There is a cabinet on the far side of the room, near the door, and the voice on the comm tells her that there is a gun and ammo in there. Why a medical room has weapons-especially weapons like the one she finds- she doesn’t know. But she plans on living long enough to find out.

“I just woke up, and I’m pissed,” Zisys mutters, tying her long hair into a tight bun before venturing out into who-knows-what, god-knows-where.

***

 

They need to stop telling her that it’s been two years since the _Normandy_ was destroyed.

Zisys is sitting in another unfamiliar room with a man named Jacob who seems fine, and a woman named Miranda who’s cute, but is really asking to get her cute ass kicked.

“Where are my people?” She asks them, and watches their faces tighten. Her last memories are coming back to her, fire and explosions and the _Normandy_ turning into their very own, contained hell. She’d been dragging Joker from the hull ‘cus the hero wanted to go down with the goddamn ship. Stupid.

These people she’s with now are Cerberus. Zisys remembers breaking up some Cerberus shit before she…died? Had she died out there? She remembers the force of an explosion knocking into her space suit, remembers hitting her head against the wall before being sucked out among the stars. Remembers being dizzy, some loud beeping only making the sleep that rolled over her all the more appealing.

Miranda seems almost irritated that Zisys won’t actually listen to anything else she’s saying. But you can’t just wake someone up, have them fight for their life, and then tell them they’ve barely been alive for _two years_.

She asks again: “Where. The fuck. Are my people?”

Scattered. Kaidan back in the Alliance Military, could be anywhere. Garrus, disappeared. Liara, disappeared. Tali, back with her flotilla. Wrex? Probably out taking jobs again. Most of her crew survived, reassigned. Her XO is dead. Zisys puts him with Ashley, puts them with the rest.

“The Illusive Man will be able to explain better,” Jacob says gently. He has a friendly, familiar face and sunny brown skin. He reaches out to touch her shoulder, then thinks better of it. “He’s waiting to talk to you.”

This man, The Illusive Man, who’d spent millions of dollars bringing her back to life. Zisys shifts in the uncomfortable suit, pulling her hair out of her bun; it’s giving her a headache. Strange. But then, it _has_ been two years since the last time she wore one.

God, that is so fucking _odd_.

She sighs. “I guess I’ll go talk to him, then.”

Turns out, he’s just a white dude with a lot of money. He talks like he owns her, even though his mouth says that he’s giving her a choice but you don’t give a multi-million dollar investment a choice; _Zisys_ wouldn’t give a sentient, multi-million dollar investment a choice.

He tells her that she has been declared dead. Already had a funeral and everything. She might not be a Council Spectre anymore, but shit if she isn’t a ghost proper now. That, she realizes, just makes it so much easier for her to do the work this guy wants her to do. Going after these Collectors and ultimately, the Reapers.

The _thought_ of Sovereign’s voice makes her shiver.

“Do I get a ship, then?” She folds her arms and narrows her eyes at The Illusive Man when he smiles at her.

She gets her lady back, alright: the _Normandy_ re-upped, and she gets good ol’ annoying ass Joker as the cherry on top.

It surprises them both how happy she is to seem him and he doesn’t say anything about the way she hugs him to him, calling him out of his name in the same breath. Only hugs her back, and laughs.

***

_Saren is unkillable, too fast and too strong._

_Tali first._

Zisys runs into Tali on Freedon’s Progress and meets a new quarian in her dear girl’s skin, an older quarian. Tali’Zorah _vas Neema_ , an adult. Two years is a long time, and Tali says as much; she’s distant, like she’s afraid.

  _I thought you were dead, you_ _’re not dead. But Shepard, I have responsibilities._

They hug before separating, and Zisys feels hope in the way her favorite girl squeezes her tight.

“We’ll run into each other again, boo,” Zisys says. The way Tali’s eyes turn to slits behind her helmet lets Zisys know that she smiles. She believes it, too.

Freedom’s Progress lets her see the Collectors in action. Zisys feels like she gets two headaches at once; space feels so vast, so menacing, moreso than it ever has. Like a wide and watering mouth, just waiting to close down on them. It makes her dizzy.

The Illusive Man- Zisys calls him Andrew in her head- gives her dossiers; She needs a build a team so that she can lead them all to premature deaths they didn’t ask for.

Except, it seems, for the Archangel; He’s already got his foot halfway in the grave. So she goes after him first. It’s not everyday she gets to save an angel, anyway, and maybe it’ll be good luck for the shit-show she probably won’t survive with these Collectors.

It hasn’t been lost on her that fucking Andrew revived her just to send her off to die. Again. Fuck him. Fuck him and his archaic fucking _Tron_ contact lenses.

By the time she gets to this holed-up fucker, this Archangel in the slums waiting to be eaten by the galaxy’s demons, she’s so happy that it ends up being _Garrus_ of all people because she takes a bullet graze to her arm and she doesn’t mar up her skin for just anyone. The turian himself is dazed - he thought she was dead, everyone thought she was dead- but he holds her just as tightly as Tali does when she pulls his pointy ass close same way she’s been doing since Cerberus Lazarus’d her.

“I knew you were amazing,” Garrus says, the trill of his layered voice vibrating in her hair. “I just…didn’t think you had _resurrection_ in you.” His armor is different; he looks more at home in this, wherever he got it from. He seems different but again, two years is a long time.

“My trigger finger is worth millions, Vakarian,” Zisys says, pulling away from him. “No one can cap a bitch like me.”

He just laughs and presses their foreheads together for a split second and it seems to startle him; it startles her a little, too. She’s never been missed, not really. She doesn’t really understand.

They aren’t done saving his ass, though; he’s got one hell of a gang out for his blood, and they’ve got toys that pack beaucoup bullets.

“I’m gonna have to charge you for this shit.” Zisys preps her new favorite toy, her rapid-fire shotgun, and does the mental thing that Jacob has been showing her, this mental clearing that helps with her biotics.

But then they shoot Garrus, really fuck him up, and she blows one of their toys right the fuck up.

***

_Tali first. Her body, crumpled in the rubble._

_Garrus next. Saren skewers him with a long metal stake that reminds Zisys of the pillars that turn human bodies into Husks. Garrus just convulses, just bleeds. He still shoots his gun for the longest moment of Zisys_ _’ life before submitting, so reluctantly it seems, to death. He doesn’t have the full-body suit to hide his face; Zisys sees it, has known him long enough that she understands that he dies not in pain, but rage._

“Shepard.”

Zisys wakes up all at once with a crick in her neck. She has fallen asleep in a chair near Garrus’s bed in the medical bay. His hand is on her leg but he retreats when she focuses in on him. He looks a mess; his face is fucked up and it doesn’t even shine cool light from the cracks like hers does. She’s got a spiderweb-type deal going on across her cheek, creeping over her nose. It glows like fireflies are caught beneath the skin.

“What’s the matter?” Garrus croaks, coughing. His bandages are clean and they weren’t the last time she remembers, which means that she has been here a while.

“Nightmares.”

“About the shipwreck? The _Normandy_?”

“Nope,” Zisys shakes her head, “and honestly, that would make more sense. Last thing I knew before I…before I died, I guess. But I’m dreaming about Saren.”

“…Oh…damn.”

Quiet creeps over them both, giving room to memory: burning metal and blood in the air. Fire, explosions, so many dead. The sound of Sovereign’s voice, even the memory of the memory of it, chills her skin. The Illusive Man has sent her after something she’s unsure he understands. Hell, she’d had a full-blown conversation with a Reaper and she _still_ doesn’t understand. All she knows is that _they are coming_ and it’ll just be her, Garrus, Joker, fucking _Cerberus_ , and whoever else she can rope into this hot mess of a run.

“Gonna leave now?” Garrus pulls his sheet over himself, groaning the entire time, and Zisys rolls her eyes at the theatrics. He might be different- harder, rougher, meaner somehow- but some things never change.

“I might snatch up that bed,” Zisys says, nodding to the empty one next to him. “Make sure you don’t die of agony in the night.”

“If those Blue Suns couldn’t kill me in the thick of it, I’m not dying from some damn scratches.”

“Vakarian…Garrus, they wholesale _shot you up_ ,” Zisys laughs. “You are a turian full of bullet holes.”

Garrus chuckles. “Holey Archangel.”

“Please,” Zisys chokes on nothing at all, coughing and laughing. “Two years and you’re making good, bad human jokes.” She stands, wincing at the way her muscles protest, and shuffles over to the empty bed. Her boots thud a messy rhythm until she drops herself onto the stiff mattress. It feels better than it should.

“I learned it from one of my guys.”

All of his guys are dead.

Both of them seem to sigh at the same time.

“You know I understand that, Vakarian.”

“I know.”

“So, if ever…”

“Yeah. Maybe after we save the galaxy again.”

“Which we will.” Zisys doesn’t fully believe that, but if she keeps saying it then maybe. Just maybe. “Then, you’re buying me a drink.”

“Tried that once. Maybe second time’s the charm,” Garrus says with a smile in his voice. “Then I’ll buy you a whole round.”

Zisys just laughs, and closes her eyes. Maybe all of them - Tali too, and the others if she can get a word out to them, wherever they may be - can come together and have a drink. Fill her in on the two years she missed.

That still shakes her. To Zisys it only feels like she took a bad nap and woke up stiff. But not two years later, not _that_ stiff.

“You know, I missed you,” Garrus murmurs. It wouldn’t be like him to leave it where it lay. “I mourned you and I missed you. I think everyone did; we all moved on, but it never felt right. You showing up, saving my ass, _that_ feels right. So…I’m glad you’re not dead after all.”

Zisys is both touched and detached from the way he feels; she can appreciate it, but it doesn’t register. She has lost time but then she hasn’t, really.

She knows how Garrus feels about her. He has made it clear enough. And so she can appreciate that this is difficult for him.

“I’m not dead after all,” she echoes him, and it sounds worse than it does in her head. “I’m right here. Reach out your hand.”

The space between their beds is minimal; when he does as she asks, she tugs at each of his three fingers. It is meant to be an approximation of comfort, in lieu of taking his hand and holding it, but he catches her before she can pull away and squeezes. Holds on for a few seconds before retreating.

“This is where Tali would say something smart,” he says, “about me being stupid.”

“Funny enough, I’m never around for that.”

“I’m really glad you’re not dead, Zisys.” Whenever he says her first name it is hesitant, like he truly thinks she’ll snap at him for it in the quiet of the med bay. It creates distance, something that Zisys still needs even if she’s not three feet away from him.

“Me too, Garrus. Now go ahead and go to sleep. Holey Archangels need to heal from their gunshot wounds.”

He laughs at that, a vibration of clicks and trills. “Need the space for more gunshot wounds later.”

“Exactly.” She turns on her side, pulling her sheet over her head. “Night, Vakarian.”

“Night Shepard.”

Tomorrow she has to run a ship full of people she neither knows nor fully trusts. But she’s got two people on board now, at least. Before she falls asleep, Zisys thinks about whether or not she’s truly gonna reach back out to Tali. At least to see her, if not to convince her to risk her life again.

_I am quite the friend._

When she sleeps she dreams about Saren turning twisted, murderous intent on her. And when she wakes, she’ll wonder why a dead man is what her subconscious decides to latch on to, with so much between then and now, and so much ahead of her.

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a hot second since I updated! I'm working my way through playing ME2, so there should be a few more piece for it before I dive into ME3. Thanks for following this little disjointed story-thing.


End file.
